Quote

I have always believed that on important issues, the leaders must lead. Where the leaders fail to lead, and people are really concerned about it, the people will take the lead and make the leaders follow.

Kofi Annan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Kofi Annan
Age: 80 †
Born: 1938
Born: April 8
Died: 2018
Died: August 18
Diplomat
Economist
Politician
Coomassie
Kofi Atta Annan
Annan
Kofi A. Annan
Take
Leaders
Must
Fail
Important
Lead
Follow
Really
Concerned
Make
Failing
Always
Leader
People
Issues
Believed

More quotes by Kofi Annan

Image
Ameen Rihani, one of the earliest Arab Americans, devoted his life to bringing the East and the West together. We are not of the East or the West, he wrote. No boundaries exist in our breast: We are free.
Kofi Annan
Image
Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories.
Kofi Annan
Image
If tolerance, respect and equity permeate family life, they will translate into values that shape societies, nations and the world.
Kofi Annan
Image
Elections with integrity are a challenge everywhere, including in the West.
Kofi Annan
Image
Let us, above all, be clear that, without a convincing program of debt relief to start the new millennium, our objective of halving world poverty by 2015 will be only a pipe dream.
Kofi Annan
Image
My intimate knowledge of the [UN] system allowed me to get things done despite the many obstacles.
Kofi Annan
Image
The Security Council should be seen as the executive committee of the global security system set up after World War II. Its members, and especially the Permanent 5 (P5), have a special responsibility for international peace and security.
Kofi Annan
Image
If you are neutral in a situation where one side is patently being mistreated, the conclusion is that you're siding with this wrong.
Kofi Annan
Image
After the end of the cold war, everybody thought, fantastic, finally the UN may be able to do what it was originally set up to do without big power divisions. It would be easy to get them to come together to resolve things. You will recall, on the first Gulf war, you almost got a unanimous resolution and a very solid coalition.
Kofi Annan
Image
We need to keep hope alive and strive to do better.
Kofi Annan
Image
Tony Blair is a very able politician he's perhaps one of the best of his generation. He made a major contribution in many areas, but in Iraq I believe he got it wrong. He got it wrong.
Kofi Annan
Image
Any society that does not succeed in tapping into the energy and creativity of its youth will be left behind.
Kofi Annan
Image
There is a certain tendency on the part of some Americans to treat the UN as a multilateralism à la carte where you pick and choose where it suits you and when it doesn't suit you, you pull back.
Kofi Annan
Image
Open markets offer the only realistic hope of pulling billions of people in developing countries out of abject poverty, while sustaining prosperity in the industrialized world.
Kofi Annan
Image
The international community... allows nearly 3 billion people - almost half of all humanity - to subsist on $2 or less a day in a world of unprecedented wealth.
Kofi Annan
Image
If our hopes of building a better and safer world are to become more than wishful thinking, we will need the engagement of volunteers more than ever.
Kofi Annan
Image
Perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date has been the Montreal Protocol.
Kofi Annan
Image
For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right.
Kofi Annan
Image
I think the generational change is going to be so important for Africa that we really should encourage and push it as much as we can, because some of these younger men and women, who are men and women of their times, and are also connected to the rest of the world, wouldn't even know how to behave in the way some of the old leaders do.
Kofi Annan
Image
Once you are really challenged, you find something in yourself. Man doesn't know what he is capable of until he is asked.
Kofi Annan